Would you eat raw testicles to become an alpha male?
Annie Kelly and Julian Feeld, co-hosts of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, join Fever Dreams co-hosts Will Sommer and Kelly Weill to discuss the wild new methods used in the conspiracy-riddled, far-right world of manosphere influencers.
“This masculinity influencer market, the guru market, had become so saturated that it’s not enough to just say you need to eat steak and own the libs anymore. Now it has to be raw testicles,” Kelly says of masculinity influencers’ obsession with eating uncooked organ meat.
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Some of those influencers are most successful with disaffected or lonely men looking for control in their lives, notes Feeld, whose new podcast’s series, Man Clan, dives deep into the conspiracy-riddled empire. “We’re dealing with such, I think, profound despair and loneliness that oftentimes we are drawn to these more extreme things,” he says.
Then, the midterms are here and so are the petty Republican feuds. As voting got underway on Tuesday, Sommer and Weill checked in on would-be GOP candidate Laura Loomer, who now blames her latest failed campaign on Milo Yiannopoulos, the troll-turned-Marjorie Taylor Greene intern.
“She claims to have proof, these text messages, that Milo was sabotaging her campaign in some sort of unclear way, in an effort to keep her from getting to Congress and hanging out with Marjorie Taylor Greene,” Sommer says.
Loomer might not hold office, but Greene could be on the forefront of an effort to impeach President Joe Biden (albeit on unclear charges) if Republicans clinch the House of Representatives in the midterm.
“This is this tactic that you see time and time again from Republicans,” Weill says. “If Democrats have anything on them, they turn around and try to manufacture an equal and opposite investigation or criminal proceeding … If Trump was impeached, not once but twice, will they have to get two or more strikes on Biden so that they feel like the score is even?”
Later on the podcast, Weill and Sommer catch up on the Black Robe Regiment, a far-right coalition of pastors seeking to seize political influence across the country. Sommer, who’s encountered members of the movement at political demonstrations, says the group is part of a growing embrace of Christian nationalism on the right.
“I think it’s an ominous development, and this is of course occurring at a time where we’re seeing more and more Republican leaders who are generally on the fringe—although Marjorie Taylor Greene is obviously a huge deal in the Republican Party—increasingly say ‘Yes, we are Christian nationalist, this is a Christian nationalist movement,’” Sommer says. “And of course I think the Black Robe Regiment sort of seeks to be an armed wing of that.”
This episode was recorded as voters went to the polls. But already, those votes were being complicated by vigilantes who tasked themselves with policing the election. Weill and Sommer check in on vigilante Telegram groups, where members award each other “points” for conspiracy theories about people whom they wrongly accuse of voter fraud.
“They take this baseless vigilantism and they crowdsource it,” Weill says. “They chuck it out to the group and encourage other people to join them in their quest and hunt down these suspicious characters who, hey, just might have Latino last names.”
